John Light

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John is TPM‘s Prime editor. His writing has also appeared at The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Salon, Slate, UN Dispatch, Vox, Worth, and Al Jazeera, and has been broadcast on Public Radio International. Before joining TPM, John was a producer for Bill Moyers and WNYC, and worked as a news writer for Grist. He grew up in New Jersey, studied history and film at Oberlin College, and got his master‘s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

In a recent legal filing, Paul Manafort alleges that government leakers have pulled off an “elaborate hoax” to frame him, Tierney Sneed reports. The allegation plays into the accusation, often repeated by President Trump’s allies, that the “deep state” is conspiring against them and undermining the President’s agenda.

It’s been a busy year for the members of this shadowy cabal. Here’s what else they’ve gotten up to:

“an empty vessel when it comes to things like the Constitution and rule of law” —EPA Administrator Scott PruittWhy: Because, according to Pruitt, Trump would break the law in less creative ways than Obama.

In an interview with Fox & Friends last week, President Trump, perhaps surprisingly, expressed support for doing away with the Electoral College, which granted him victory in 2016 though he lost the popular vote. Connecticut, meanwhile, may join an interstate compact which seeks to nullify the Electoral College; states that sign on to the National Popular Vote compact pledge to award all of their electoral college votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote. If states representing 270 electoral votes sign on, the compact will go into effect. Connecticut’s decision to do so would bring the total number of electoral votes on board with the compact to 172.

Tierney Sneed reports that though cities are doing all they can to ensure an accurate count on the 2020 Census, they feel they are “swimming against the tide,” in the words of Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, given what they describe as a lack of leadership from the Trump administration exacerbated by concerns about the new citizenship question. Civil rights advocates fear an undercount of minorities, which could lead to redistricting plans that undermine the voting power of non-white communities.

In related news, the Department of Justice has removed from its manual references to ensuring fair representation of minorities on election maps under the Voting Rights Act.

Florida Governor Rick Scott won a temporary victory on Wednesday when a federal appeals court delayed a lower-court judge’s ruling striking down Florida’s system for re-enfranchising felons who, under state law, lose the right to vote when convicted of a crime. The current system requires felons to wait five years after serving time, after which they can only have their right to vote restored if granted approval from the Clemency Board, which is made up of high-ranking members of Scott’s administration, including Scott himself. A ballot measure to reform the system will be put to a vote this November, potentially overturning the system regardless of how legal proceedings shake out.

Less than two weeks before early voting begins in Arkansas’s 2018 primaries, a judge blocked the state’s voter ID law. State officials immediately appealed the decision to the state’s Supreme Court.

On Friday, a federal appeals court upheld Texas’s voter ID law, saying it did not discriminate against minorities. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard challenges to Texas electoral maps from 2011 that allegedly discriminate against minorities — a legal dispute that conservatives have succeeded in drawing out over the better part of a decade.

Nicole LaFond reports that a 43-year-old African American Texas woman is asking for a new trial after she was hit with a five-year sentence for filing a provisional ballot while on supervised release. A lawyer for the woman told TPM she believes the charges were part of a Republican effort to identify instances of voter fraud for political reasons. Also last week, a white Republican judge in the same county got five years probation for submitting fake signatures to qualify to be on the ballot.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mick Mulvaney, the acting head of an agency that regulates banking told a room full of bankers this week. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Mulvaney, of course, is the man who is attempting an about-face for the agency he helms, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That includes rebranding the consumer watchdog by scrambling the letters in its name (Mulvaney suggests “BCFP”) and ending its practice of logging consumer complaints.

As a former member of Congress from South Carolina, Mulvaney’s campaigns raised at least half a million dollars from the investment and banking industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He is now overseeing the agency tasked with keeping these same industries in check. The New York Times noted that he received $63,000 from payday lenders alone, an industry that, under Mulvaney’s predecessor Richard Cordray — now a Democratic candidate for the governor of Ohio — the industry cracked down on for its predatory practices. Mulvaney famously called the CFPB a “sick, sad joke” while it was under Cordray’s stewardship.

Following his speech to the American Bankers Association, Mulvaney’s spokesperson claimed that his words had been misinterpreted, noting that Mulvaney also said he would listen to his constituents regardless of whether they donated. His money-talks “hierarchy” only applied to lobbyists.

Nonetheless, his honesty provoked outrage. Some Democrats called for him to step down. “Let’s call it what it is: corruption,” wrote the Washington Post’s ostensibly conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin.

What Mulvaney laid bare, of course, doesn’t even rise to the level of an open secret. Members of Congress can spend up to half their time “dialing for dollars,” soliciting donations like these to fund their reelection efforts. In return, they have to offer something. Usually, that something is access. This is the sort of thing the Supreme Court acknowledged and affirmed with its 2010 Citizens United decision. As election law expert Rick Hasen notes, Justice Kennedy explicitly wrote that “ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.”

So by the Supreme Court’s definition, Mulvaney did not admit to anything corrupt. Mulvaney went further. Lobbyists’ efforts to sway him with donations were, in fact, one of the “fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy,” he said in his speech. “And you have to continue to do it.”

It may not be corruption. But it also doesn’t seem on message for an administration that promised a fully drained swamp.

For saying the quiet part loud, Mick Mulvaney is our Duke of the Week.

TPM scooped this week that former FBI Director James Comey had retained Patrick Fitzgerald as his personal lawyer; Cameron Joseph, who got us that story, took a look at some of the parallels between the current special counsel probe and the special counsel probe into the Valerie Plame affair, for which Fitzgerald himself was special counsel.

Scott Pruitt was on the hill this week to answer for the many scandals encircling his tenure at EPA. Ahead of the hearings, Matt Shuham put together this list of things Pruitt spent money on but wasn’t supposed to. After the grilling he put together another list of Republicans who decided to apologize for their Democratic colleagues’ tough questions.

Trump’s travel ban, meanwhile, had it’s day before the Supreme Court. Alice Ollstein was there for oral arguments and takes a look at some of the clues she got providing insights into how the justices were thinking about the case.

On the voting rights front, Kris Kobach, a week after being held in contempt by the judge overseeing his proof-of-citizenship case, put out a legal filing that contained a handful of accidentally included notes to self, including that one point “PROBABLY ISN’T WORTH ARGUING.” This attracted some guffaws, including from Zack Roth, who ran through Kobach’s other recent legal blunders.

Meanwhile, voting rights advocates saw some victories. As Zack writes in a separate Editor’s Brief, Connecticut is considering joining an interstate compact that seeks to subvert the electoral college; Tierney Sneed rounds up a few others victories in her voting rights Weekly Primer.

And, prompted by Allegra Kirkland’s article on law enforcement malpractice in Alabama, David Kurtz reflects on his own experience reporting on sheriffs in the deep south, where the office basically has the power of a minor feudal lord.